Confessing the Perfect Other

My exploration of the idea of God as the Perfect Other must start with a confession.  I have had a type of thought—and I will not say the thought itself is a bad thing—which I think is an understandable type of thought.  The thought, which I have entertained on and off for a number of years, is basically a conjecture to the effect that God is meant to be understandable to humans through a challenging of humans’ ability to conjecture beyond “normal” thought.  That is, God is meant to be understandable to humans if only humans will allow his sovereignty to be expressed in transcendence across concepts common to our experience.

The chief example of this type of thought as I have experienced it—and intermittently attempted to embrace it—is in Luke (and in slightly different form elsewhere in the Synoptics.)  In Luke 10, Jesus responds approvingly to the following answer from a “lawyer” about the most important aspects of the law:

“And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself.”

My fascination with this passage arose from a notion that we were being challenged to test our limits of understanding of God by employing a certain logical device.  That is, if our love for God is supposed to be deserving of all of our capacities (heart, soul, strength, mind) and yet we are to love our neighbor, what then can we conclude but that—in some sort of pantheistic fashion—our neighbor, in order to be an object of the love which we must devote in its entirety to God, must be for us a part or aspect of God?

This conjecture, I must be careful to point out, is at least in part independent of the notion that Jesus is to be seen in our fellow humans.  To speak of us viewing other people as Jesus is more an evocative statement than a declarative one.  We can never forget that other people are not in fact Jesus—are not in fact possessed of the qualities of Jesus—and in any event in the lawyer’s response it is not “Jesus” or even “Messiah” that is phrased as the object of a person’s love, but God himself.

The lawyer says, in effect, that we are to give God all our love, and also that we are to love each other.  We do not solve the quandary thus presented by claiming that “in a certain vein” (such as persons potentially being believers being connected to Jesus being connected to God) we are all part of God.  God in such an instance of analysis is not God, but is—in part, at least—reduced to a physical, temporal phenomenon.  How this might be, we can attribute to “mystery,” but it would be just as “logical” to contemplate a “mystery” in which the love we must feel for God is as much different (and mutually exclusive, and independently overlapping) from the love we must feel for each other, as God himself is different from humanity.

God is different from us.  That is why he is worshipped.  God is not worshipped because he is like us, though we might frame our worship in terms of the familiar.  For example, we might declare that God’s love for us is as the love of mother for child.  Of course, to complete the thought, we must say that even if our mother’s love was to fail us, God’s love would not—which is not really a statement of praise to the Almighty.  What we might really mean is that our appreciation of God’s love for us is as our appreciation of the Perfect Mother’s love—which is really to compare God to himself.  And that how it ought to be.

To rephrase my contention from above, we must reject the notion that God is meant to be understandable to humans if only humans will allow his sovereignty to be appreciated in transcendence across concepts common to our experience.  Concepts are not the way we bridge the chasm between ourselves and God.  Concepts are the way we bridge the gap between our not thinking of God and our thinking of God.

Concepts are the way we can remind ourselves that God cannot be conceptualized.  God is the Perfect Other, not the Perfect Thing, not the Perfect Things, not the Perfect Infinitude of Things.